How Important is RPM for Hard Drives


Looking to purchase another 2tb SATA drive for music storage. I'm seeing 7200 rpm drives that are maybe a bit noisier and run a bit warmer than 5400 rpm drives that are cooler but slower. The 7200 drive (Hitachi) may be a tad more reliable than the 5400 Western Digital or Seagate - not sure. I do plenty of backup anyway.

Thing is, with over 1.5 Tb of music, I imagine seek times can be somewhat slow. Once a music file is found, there ae no skips or pauses with itunes. Does the rotation speed matter much for seek times on such a large music library, or is the rpm more an issue for writing/reading higher bandwidth information than music?

Thanks, Peter
peter_s

Showing 1 response by magfan

Classic,
which RAID are you reff'ing?
Raid 0,1 / 0+1? I'd agree.
RAID 5 with a 5 disk array should be able to reconstruct a dead disk, on the fly, with few interruptions. Hot Swapable? A must.

I thought RAID was a goner? Staging a comeback? Any ESATA arrays?

Off Site may be the long term / secure answer.